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These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.

And You Thought It Would Fail: Complaints were made when the game first started about the structure, which kept everyone in mod-controlled Cast Herds instead of letting individual players run their own airships. This structure actually helped in the end by preventing the rampant character limbo caused by drops by keeping all the ships under mod control and having ready replacements for captains and first mates who dropped the game, as well as by allowing the plot to progress at a believable pace set by people who knew what was going on. And the game? It lasted from 2008 to 2011 and had a proper beginning, middle, and end. So ha.

Arc Fatigue: Cutoff dates were implemented for plots that dragged out too long.

Archive Panic: Fanwriter-tan expresses this at the beginning of the feature, and only picked up the series near the very end because her friend list was filled with reactions to the game's OTP hooking up. Her anxiety fades as the feature goes on, and by the time she hits season two, she's officially addicted.

Catharsis Factor: The ending arc. Finally, after almost three years of being innocent bystanders to terrorist plots, getting there too late, or being tricked into helping them out? The characters — and, thus, the players — really get to fight back. Judging by the last-minute return of player-favourite NPCs and former PCs, the mods definitely know this is a factor here.

Come for the X, Stay for the Y: Many of the muns came for the unique setting and the chance to play an AU without Mundanization, which dominated AU games when TST opened back in 2008. Then the plot really got going, and that's what TST is best known for now.

Continuity Lockout: The mod team did their best to avert this by explaining previous plot-relevant events in info posts for later ones that were in some way related.

Kefka nothing, Gin wins here. He had piles of CR and was the nominal villain of the second arc (well, technically, Aizen was, and for those very reasons, he fits here too), and the things he did in the game were legendary, from eating Ika-chan to scarring Shinjiro badly enough that he can't even think of pursuing his own relationships even after Gin's been out of his life for a year. The best thing he did, though, on the Creepy Awesome scale, was setting up his own Engineered Public Confession to get rid of his victim's ghost, while making sure that, even if everyone heard him admitting to killing Jean Morris, no one would believe him.

"Everyone is moe for Kaoru" became a minor meme in the third arc, partially because of her Creepy Child deadpan, Ambiguous Innocence, and capability of mass destruction.

Dry Docked Ship: Angel/Zou is the one that first comes to mind, but speculation, headcanon, and outright game-canon have hooked many characters up in the game's backstory while leaving them single now.

Ending Aversion: Inevitable with certain character arcs, but the main plot got resolved in full, even if it took three months to do it.

Expectation Lowerer: The characters go on exciting adventures that affect the fate of the world, but the players seem to be just as concerned with how badly they fail at their day-to-day lives.

Fan-Preferred Couple: The two had no significant interaction when Franziska was still in the game, and there's no indication the two would have any interest in each other, or even in each others' genders. So why, exactly, were there players shipping Franziska and Toshirou? Well... in short, because it's funny.

Fridge Horror: After the effects of the Hegua Lake explosion really sunk in, it took a while for the muns to realize that, hey, some of the characters' homes and families are gone now...

Nobody who's tried to explore the lower cloud layer has ever returned. It seems like a throwaway bit of flavour text to set the world in a sort of Age of Exploration, but much, much later in the game, we find out that there's a giant snake under there, and when you think about it, it probably ate them all.

Gameplay Derailment: Shiphopping had to be clamped down upon months after the game started, as people specifically apped characters with clear intent to never keep them on one ship.

Harsher in Hindsight: Hey, you know those falling islands that were a big deal back in "Season 1"? Yeah... after Climax BossJormungandr was revealed, it's pretty easy to tell what happened to them now.

Ho Yay: The game is actually considerably light on yaoi and yuri hook-ups compared to other roleplays. It makes up for it with this trope in spades.

Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: A lot of people in the game really don't like Portmanteau Couple Names for some reason or another, and many of the players took it upon themselves to think of new ship names because of this. The results were... mixed, but names like "Bentoshipping" get about as much use as their counterparts like "Ichiwata".

I Knew It: A plot took place in the town of Spoons. One player pointed out that this sounded like Forks, and some jokes were made about how they would be fighting sparklepires. Many days later, more details about the plot were revealed...

Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Way, way too many characters are far too much fun to ship with everyone they know. In fact, it's almost a requirement in memes.

Like You Would Really Do It: Since there's no auto-resurrect in this setting, it's well-known that character death only comes when the mun fully intends to drop the character. Of course, with the ending coming up, the muns had less to lose...

Magnificent Bastard: Any villain who had their own subplot affecting a whole ship (Kefka had Doma, Gin had Morris, etc.) or the whole game was more than likely one of these. (Kaoru doesn't count. She had her own plot, but it was about rescuing her, not about something horrible she had done and gotten away with.) NPC-wise, Wilsborough is an Obstructive Bureaucrat who stares evidence of Denouement's conspiracy in the face and gleefully ignores it to blame his political enemies for the atrocities instead; it's implied in the epilogue that he was a member of Denouement himself, and may even have been the one who sent the disguised order to plant the bombs in Parliament.

Mind Game Ship: Gin/Shinjiro, oh, boy, Gin/Shinjiro. So wrong and so creepy, but if you like that kind of thing... yeah. In the invented AU where TST is a real show, the ship has a huge Misaimed Fandom.

Ron the Death Eater: Parodied in a Kink Meme story making fun of bad fanfiction, in which the Parody Sue deposes a suddenly evil main character who would have shown the viewers no sign of being evil just for the sake of the fanbrat author's plot. The kicker? It's Bradley.

Saved by the Fans: Edgeworth was supposed to be Killed Off for Real when Bradley caught him investigating the murder on the Amestris. Another mun who knew what was going on made the case that other character arcs would have more satisfying conclusions were he to live.

Narrowly averted. Kaoru was this close to saved before a rush of "Just so you know, I'm not killing off any of my characters, okay?" messages took over Plurk's TST contingent after Optimus Prime died. Her mun... stopped worrying about character death in finales being overdone.

Tear Jerker: Muns have freely admitted to crying IRL at many of the more dramatic scenes with characters they played or stalked.

Villain Decay: Averted; everyone pretty much stayed at their original threat level throughout. Due to strings of coincidences leading to apps and drops, no major villain stuck around in the spotlight for more than a year or so, so (in a blessing in disguise) there wasn't even much of an opportunity for them to start to suck!

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